If the IRS demanded your emails, and you said the computer “crashed” and ate them, they’d buy that, right?

The IRS expects us to believe that they so monumentally incompetent at information technology that they can’t produce Lois Lerner’s emails from January 2009 through April 2011. No backups? No RAID duplication? No way to reconstruct them out of the bad hard drive?

Even the best possible interpretation of this — taking the IRS at its word — is a damning indictment of the agency. It would show that basic network hygiene used by the private sector since the last century still is too advanced for the biggest taxing agency in the world.

But you may be excused for suspecting evil instead of incompetence here. Congressional investigators have been looking for these emails for months. Evidence has been building of an interagency effort between the IRS and the Justice Department to shut down, and even prosecute, unfriendly organizations. Now, suddenly, poof, no more emails. I don’t buy it.

The IRS statement says “In the course of collecting and producing Ms. Lerner’s additional emails, the IRS determined her hard drive crashed in 2011.” What email system does the IRS use where the emails live on individual hard drives, rather than an email server? Do any of you readers use your PC as your email server? If so, do you never back it up?

And if you buy the IRS story, then tell my why on earth this exceptionally inept agency should be responsible for administering the nation’s health insurance system through the ACA. Or even the income tax, for that matter.

Please provide a timeline of the crash and documentation covering when it was first discovered and by whom; when, how and by whom it was learned that materials were lost; the official documentation reporting the crash and federal data loss; documentation reflecting all attempts to recover the materials; and the remediation records documenting the fix. This material should include the names of all officials and technicians involved, as well as all internal communications about the matter.

Please provide all documents and emails that refer to the crash from the time that it happened through the IRS’ disclosure to Congress Friday that it had occurred.

Please provide the documents that show the computer crash and lost data were appropriately reported to the required entities including any contractor servicing the IRS. If the incident was not reported, please explain why.

Please provide a list summarizing what other data was irretrievably lost in the computer crash. If the loss involved any personal data, was the loss disclosed to those impacted? If not, why?

Please provide documentation reflecting any security analyses done to assess the impact of the crash and lost materials. If such analyses were not performed, why not?

Please provide documentation showing the steps taken to recover the material, and the names of all technicians who attempted the recovery.

Please explain why redundancies required for federal systems were either not used or were not effective in restoring the lost materials, and provide documentation showing how this shortfall has been remediated.

Please provide any documents reflecting an investigation into how the crash resulted in the irretrievable loss of federal data and what factors were found to be responsible for the existence of this situation.

For a phony scandal, it’s amazing how real they’re making it look.

Lois Lerner, ex-IRS, ex-FEC

Other Coverage:

Russ Fox, The Two Year Gap. “Either the IRS is deliberately lying or they have the worst IT department and policies of any company, organization, or government entity in the world.”

The IRS does not like the concept of “personal goodwill”, but courts have often approved it. In the Tax Court decision in the case of Bross Trucking, the concept was confirmed again, helping to save the taxpayer from what appears to me to be a real overreach on the part of the IRS.

Howard Gleckman, The Strange Fruit of the House’s Bonus Depreciation Bill (TaxVox). “If I had read the bill more carefully, I would have noticed that while it applied to fruit that grows on trees and vines, it inexplicably excluded fruit that grows on bushes. As a blueberry lover, I am shocked and outraged.”

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As someone who has kept one eye on the IRS’s information technology modernization efforts over the last several years, yeah, I can totally believe they lost her email, and yeah, it doesn’t surprise me that it took them this long to figure out it was lost. They probably had to search every floppy disk in the building.

Someone dug up this part of the Internal Revenue Manual — http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html#d0e131 — which says, I kid you not, that IRS employees are responsible for printing out hardcopies of all emails and attachments they send and receive in the course of their duties, and filing these appropriately.

It will probably be considered “scandalous” when the IRS is also unable to find these paper records, but I’d be more scandalized if they can. Imagine printing out and filing every email and attachment you exchange in the course of your work day every day… when would you have time for anything else but changing toner cartridges?